1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to tools for internationalization of software. More particularly, the present invention relates to an improved method, apparatus, and computer program for assessing the capability of an application to handle different languages and character sets.
2. Description of Related Art
JAVA, a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc., is an object-oriented, compiled, multi-threaded computer language that generates platform-independent executable files.
JAVA is object-oriented. This means, in the simplest terms, that it allows for the association of member functions or “methods” within data structures. Indeed, all JAVA programs are made up solely of data structure types known as “classes,” where classes contain both data fields and methods.
Classes may “inherit” characteristics of other classes. When a “descendant” class inherits from another “ancestral” class, it inherits all of the data fields and methods of the ancestral class. In addition, a descendent class may provide its own methods to supplement or take the place of ancestral class methods.
JAVA is compiled. That means that before a JAVA program (written as source code) can be executed, it must be processed by a compiler to make an executable form of the program. Executable JAVA programs are stored in “.class” files, with each “.class” file containing executable object code for a single JAVA class.
JAVA is multi-threaded. This means that a single JAVA program can have several sequences of code executing concurrently. Each of these sequences is known as a thread. Multi-threaded program languages, such as JAVA, are very useful when writing software such as, for instance, communication software, where it is helpful to allow the software to perform other tasks while waiting for input.
JAVA produces platform-independent executables. When a JAVA program is compiled to produce “.class” files, those “.class” files are capable of being executed on any platform having a JAVA runtime environment. A JAVA runtime environment is a piece of software that allows a computer to executes JAVA “.class” files. JAVA runtime environments are available for many, if not most, commonly used computer platforms today.
There are essentially two kinds of JAVA runtime environments: interpreters and just-in-time compilers. Interpreters directly interpret the binary code contained in “.class” files and execute instructions corresponding to that binary code as the interpretation process is carried out. Just-in-time compilers, on the other hand, first translate the binary code into native instructions, then execute the native instructions. Native instructions are instructions that are designed to be executed directly by the computer's hardware.
JAVA's “write once, run anywhere” philosophy extends not only into the realm of platform independence, but also to that of software internationalization, where a principle of “write once, run anywhere in the world” applies. JAVA was among the first computer language standards to embrace Unicode, a sixteen-bit character set standard that includes not only the twenty-six letters of modern English, but a variety of characters and accented characters used in other languages. The sixteen-bit standard allows a sufficient range of characters (65,536) not only for the inclusion of multiple alphabets, such as Cyrillic and Hebrew, but also for the character sets of languages such as Chinese and Japanese. Chinese does not use an alphabet but relies on the use of thousands of different ideograms; Japanese uses two alphabets in addition to a set of approximately two thousand ideograms.
JAVA also provides a facility for internationalization known as “Resource Bundles.” Resource bundles are files that store the text messages displayed by a JAVA program. When a JAVA program uses resource bundles, it loads its text messages from the resource bundle to be displayed to a user.
By separating text messages from the program code that displays them, it becomes easier to generate versions of a program that display in different languages. To make a German translation of an English original to a program, for instance, one need only create a German resource bundle to be interchanged with the English one. Thus, keeping to JAVA's “write once, run anywhere” philosophy, the JAVA program code need only be written and compiled once.
Even though resource bundles allow code development to be performed independently of text translation, some aspects of code development are nonetheless still dependent on which human language(s) the finished product will utilize. For example, different languages use different character sets or may require different amounts of space on the screen (for example, a few of Chinese characters may represent a twenty-letter word in German). In order to fully separate the development process into separate code development and human language translation processes, code developers need some way of testing the capabilities of their software to handle various human languages without requiring actual translations of the text to be used.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,453,462 to Meade et al., incorporated herein by reference, describes the use of mock translation whereby text in a first human language is replaced with text that is modified to simulate a second human language. In the Meade patent, localization files are used to store the text displayed by the program. The translatability of the text used with a particular program is tested by using a localization file containing a “mock translation” of the original text.
The method of using mock-translated text as described in the Meade patent requires that new mock-translated localization files be generated, however. This requires that a separate mock-translating program be executed to generate new mock-translated localization files each time the original localization files change, which is somewhat tedious. What is needed, then, is a mock-translation system that does not require generation and regeneration of mock-translation files.